


Of Discovery and Sacrifice

by salienne



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Episode: s02e13 Doomsday, F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-31
Updated: 2007-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:18:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salienne/pseuds/salienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Reunion. In an attempt to rediscover herself, Rose decides to leave the Doctor, but like all things, this decision is not without a cost.</p><p>Written before JE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through "Doomsday". I suppose it would be AU now.
> 
> Thanks so much to [](http://lunaserenade.livejournal.com/profile)[**lunaserenade**](http://lunaserenade.livejournal.com/) , who managed to beta this while taking care of a new Doctor kitty and Master kitty.

Rose has been with him for six years when she makes the decision—it is time for her to leave.

Nearly thirteen years have passed since she first started traveling with the Doctor, four and a half of those spent in a parallel world. When she finally made it back to him, the man who held her hand across the galaxies, the man who made her grin with just the sound of his voice, she could have asked for nothing more. And although that departure hurt worse than anything else she had experienced, although leaving her mum and dad and Lily and Mickey and Jake and Daniel was almost like cutting out a little piece of herself and chucking it away, it was worth it.

Six wonderful, busy, thrilling, loud, and joyful years passed then, six years in which they ran side-by-side through the universe, sharing a little more than perhaps either was comfortable with but too in love to care, exchanging laughs and smiles and thoughts and touches and breaths, always together. They were happy. They still are happy.

But now it is time for her to leave.

Rose doesn’t quite know how to tell him that she needs to go. It’s not anything he’s done, and it’s not anything he hasn’t done. It’s not even him, really, but somehow she doubts saying, “It’s not you, it’s me,” will go off any better with him than it would with a human male. And there, she thinks, is the problem. The Doctor is not human. And as much as she loves him, as much as she needs him, her feelings are only adding to the very real problem that her mother’s words are becoming truer and truer every day. “You’ll keep on changing,” Jackie Tyler had said. “And in forty years time, fifty, there’ll be this woman, this strange woman, walking through the marketplace on some planet a billions miles from Earth. She’s not Rose Tyler, not anymore. She’s not even human.”

Well, it hasn’t been fifty years. It hasn’t even been forty. But Rose can still feel herself slipping away more and more every day, she can still feel herself becoming more and more like the Doctor every day, and while this is not in and of itself a bad thing, she is no longer naïve enough to think that not knowing where he ends and she begins is a good idea.  
She is coming to resent his manic grin, the way he bounces around the console, the new magenta suit, the Converse trainers, the way he always caters to her needs first. Rose is coming to resent him, the safety and the comfort and the love he provides, and she hates herself for it. She hates herself for it.

Rose doesn’t need to leave so much as get away.

He is in the console room when she finally decides to break it to him. He isn’t doing much when she walks in, just fiddling with the time stabilizer, but since they’ve been in the Vortex for nearly a day now, she strongly suspects that this will only serve to destabilize the ship. The TARDIS controls have never been her forte, however, so she could be wrong.  
After sitting down in her usual spot, Rose holds onto the front edge of the only seat in the room and waits. She knows she should probably say something but, for the life of her, she can’t think of what that is. She isn’t at all surprised when the Doctor breaks the silence, but while his words are nothing new, there is so little emotion behind them that she’s almost scared. “So when do you wanna leave?”

“Actually,” she says, playing dumb, “that’s what I need to talk t’ you about.”

He looks at her, his right hand still on the console, and his usually warm brown eyes are so empty that his next words are unnecessary. “I know.”

She stands up and walks over, wanting—no, needing—to make him understand, to wipe that pain away from his face and away from his soul. “’S not you, Doctor,” she says, “’s really not. I just, I just need to get away, I need some time for myself, some time away from …” God, she thinks, she’s even rubbish at expressing her own emotions now. Maybe she’s already more like him than she thinks. “Doctor, I still love you, I—”

“Don’t.”

The Doctor has stopped moving away, stopped pressing random buttons and pulling random levers. Instead, he’s looking right at her. And he’s angry.

“Doctor—”

“Don’t, Rose.” She swallows, and as he steps closer, close enough to kiss, she doesn’t speak. “You can leave, and I won’t stop you. You can… you can stay, and I won’t stop you. But don’t…” He breaks off, and as she looks at that familiar face, she can hardly resist the urge to put a hand to his cheek, pull him into a hug, and never ever let go. But she’s determined, she’s strong, just like he taught her to be, and clenches her fists at her sides. “You tell me which year to take you to,” he continues, “which place, and I’ll do it. But don’t expect more than that.”

He walks away, no longer under the pretense of fiddling but quite obviously putting distance between them, putting the entire console and the time rotor and the soul of the TARDIS between them, and Rose isn’t sure if she’ll ever be able to cross that distance again.

“Doctor, this isn’t permanent,” she presses, taking a step closer to him. “I can come back to you, I want t’come back to you. I just need some time.”

“How much time, hmm?” he asks, and she almost cringes underneath the glare and tone he almost always reserves for his enemies, not her. “A day, a week, a year, a century? You were the one who promised forever Rose, not me, so tell me, what’s the new time table?” He moves closer but stops several feet away. “How long do you want me to wait now?”

Rose isn’t quite sure what he means by this last sentence, but her face is too busy projecting shock and remorse to show her confusion. “Doctor, we can set up a meeting, yeah? We can find a time and a place, an’ I could travel by myself for however long an’ then I could come back to you. I could come back to you. Five minutes could pass for you, five minutes, an’ then—”

“It doesn’t work like that, Rose.”

“But it could!” She steps forward again. “Please, Doctor, please don’t—”

But he’s looking away from her now, and she knows there’s no point in continuing, not when he’s flipping switches again, not when he’s examined the monitor and moved over to the temporal scroller and he never even has to pass her to get there. “Where do you want to go?”

“Earth,” she says, using her years with Torchwood and years with him to fight back the tears. “I don’t care when. Sometime around when… sometime around when I left.” She moves towards the exit, the cave-like opening that leads to the rest of the TARDIS, and just a few feet from her destination she turns her head back toward him, willing him to look at her. “I’ll just… I’ll jus’ go get my things.”

The Doctor’s face never turns away from the console. Rose leaves the room.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-Reunion. In an attempt to rediscover herself, Rose decides to leave the Doctor, but like all things, this decision is not without a cost.

Her first year back on Earth, Rose gets a job at a department store because that’s what she used to do. It still bores her half out of her mind and, for the life of her, she can’t figure out why she didn’t quit all those years ago, why she didn’t finish her education or find a cause or join a gymnastics’ team. But she’s here to remember, she’s here to _feel_ like that girl again, so she toughs it out. She gets her A-levels, makes a few friends, and dates a man named Gareth. She misses the Doctor the entire time.

Once, during the eighth month, Jack calls her. She has her own flat now, something she was only able to afford at the beginning with the Doctor’s help, and Jack asks to come see it. The year is 2010 and, for a moment, Rose wonders how her old friend knows she is here. Then she remembers that the Doctor still has Martha Jones’s cell phone, and she remembers that Jack must know the number for the TARDIS phone by heart now, and she doesn’t wonder anymore. For the first time in a long time, Rose feels pain grip her heart in the way only a Time Lord could manage.

She’s fine, Rose tells him, fighting the stinging beneath her eyelids, but she’d really rather not be bothered right now. Then, after some half-hearted flirting, she asks him how the Doctor is.

After a long pause, Jack says, “He’s fine too,” and they both know he’s lying.

~-~-~-~-

Halfway through her second year, Jack gives her his vortex manipulator, all fixed now, and she teleports off Earth. She’s been in one place too long, she thinks, and she’s restless, hungering for more. Whatever she’s lost, she can’t find it sitting here and eating chips, not anymore.

Rose takes small jumps on her way to the farthest reaches of the galaxy and universe. The manipulator isn’t strong enough to handle more than that. She uses the dates and places she remembers from her travels with the Doctor, always careful to arrive just before him and the other her. She’s eternally grateful that the manipulator is more reliable than the TARDIS, but she can’t help but miss the thrill of uncertainty.

A few times, she fouls the coordinates up, and perhaps on some level she fouls them up on purpose, and almost runs into her old self. She almost runs into the Doctor.

The first time, it’s the one she’s used to, with his red trainers and brown suit and tan trench coat and grin and sideburns and piercing brown eyes and his hand in hers—the old hers. They arrive seconds after she does, and she dashes behind an information kiosk amongst a crowd of humans and aliens, the faint memories playing in her head as they play out a few feet from where she cowers. She peers around the kiosk and can just make out the two of them, happy and wandering off to meet their latest tentacled foe, and a wave of longing hits her so hard it’s like getting her heart broken all over again. A few of the three-armed aliens around her grumble and move away, and she can only understand them because the TARDIS is so close. Human tears are poisonous to Mellianites.

The second time she sees him, it’s the old him, the him who first grabbed her hand and told her to run, the him with the blue eyes that could make her shudder, the him she fell in love with. Probably because they’re not holding hands yet and this Doctor wasn’t the one she abandoned, the sight doesn’t hurt quite as much as the first one, not then.

That night, she can’t stop crying.

~-~-~-~-

During the fifth year, the vortex manipulator burns out, just a few months after she last spotted the Doctor. The loss has yet to stop hurting and she thinks that, maybe, she has had enough of this life on her own. She knows what sort of person she is now, doesn’t she? She knows she can handle life alone and prefers the strangeness of aliens to the familiarity of home. After all this time, Earth is still home.

That and the TARDIS, but she can’t think about that.

~-~-~-~-

Throughout the next few years, Rose hitchhikes or stows away on ship after ship after ship. The first is easier and the second more dangerous, and she isn’t sure which she prefers. She has a translator now, and her accent in the Universal Tongue is almost gone, so when she is discovered aboard the _Nero_ , they don’t chuck her out an airlock. They put her to work doing laundry and scrubbing floors instead. Soon enough, the crew warm up to her with only two significant exceptions: Trisha the engineer and Caleb the physician. Adison, Caleb’s assistant, assures Rose it’s only because the two are having a baby and are paranoid about his safety, but she can’t help but remember how her relatives and extended family had always trusted her above all others with their children, how even Bev, who scorned anyone under thirty, adored Rose and would always call her first to watch Kevin. Even while traveling aboard the TARDIS, she never had trouble inciting trust, but, Rose supposes, maybe that was a result of the Doctor’s presence, not her own.

On the planet World’s Wheel, located on the right edge of the galaxy M-72, Rose jumps ship. She has a brief affair with a man named Leon and, after their breakup and his departure, finds she is immune to the Venusean plague. For the next five months, she volunteers at emergency clinics, sleeping only every other day, every three days when she can manage it. She bathes foreheads and administers shots and washes bedpans, but she stops short of allowing the doctors to test her blood for the antibodies or genetic quirks the humans of this century lack. She’s too worried about injuring the timeline, and although every death she witnesses hurts, she can never turn away from the bigger picture.

No cure is discovered, but as always happens with pandemics, millions die, millions live, millions flee, and the universe moves on. Rose is one of the last to depart, and she can’t help but wonder how many deaths could have been prevented if she’d just gone with her instincts and let them take that sample. She can’t help but resent the Doctor a little, and she wonders how many people his presence might have saved.

~-~-~-~-

It’s the end of the eighth year, and while Rose has yet to see the Doctor again, she’s run into Jack every few months for the past three years. He never did age past those few gray hairs, and she figures he always had them, just never noticed. He claims she wanted him more grown-up and dignified when she brought him back, so she let him age just enough for optimal sexiness. She’s quick to tell him he’s full of it and to point out that she hasn’t aged a day since Satellite 5, but he tells her that’s because she’s perfect just the way he is. She rolls her eyes.

That night, the two go out dancing. Almost every time they meet, they go out dancing.

The memories are almost sweet.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-Reunion. In an attempt to rediscover herself, Rose decides to leave the Doctor, but like all things, this decision is not without a cost.

During the tenth and eleventh years, Rose is one of the key figures in a rebellion in the Jaggit Brocade, one that she herself instigates on Crespallion. The name of the planet has always sounded familiar to her, though she still can’t put her finger on why. She assumes she heard about it during her travels with the Doctor, a man whose faces are now only a blur in her memory. Sometimes she wonders whether she ever really knew him; maybe he lied or maybe he was just a dream. Even in the end, he always kept so many secrets. She pushes those thoughts away.

It starts with a woman she meets, Rijou, the governor’s secretary and the sister of an informant to the resistance. Rose isn’t in a particularly good place at the time, and while she never considers simply ending it, as Jack has, the wandering is beginning to wear her down. It’s just that, so far, she hasn’t been able to stop.

Rijou changes that. Here, on Crespallion, one galaxy over from the Milky Way, in the year 5.5/apple/36, a little over five billion years since the last time this version of Rose Tyler leapt from Earth, she makes a friend who becomes dearer to her than the hundreds of other people she has befriended. When they meet, Rose is walking down the street, her hood up, her hands shoved into her pockets, and Rijou spills a slimy sort of paint all over her and Rose somehow ends up insulting the woman’s great-aunt. They scream, people stare, and Rose is close to stomping off before Rijou drags her back to her family’s flat, insisting that she clean up there.

When the first sun sets, the two are holding onto one another and can’t stop laughing.

Everything is fine, at first. It’s more than fine; it’s fantastic. Not many people visit Crespallion, but the Governmental Station for the system is here, in orbit around the ringed golden planet, and they’re in need of a mail clerk. It’s not the most prestigious or difficult job, but Rose has never cared about that. It’s something she can do, and it’s something she can enjoy. Besides allowing her to spend more time with Rijou, the job gives her the opportunity to associate with all sorts of races and practice the languages here, since she is still unhappy with her Universal Tongue and New English. As for Crespin, Crespallion’s native tongue, after half an Earth year, the language still sounds like gibberish with the clicking thrown in to her, and she does her best to remedy that.

When Rose is first put to work, she is immediately offered quarters on the Governmental Station because of her species. This system, after all, is a labor system, providing workers to the rich and powerful, and out of all its planets, Crespallion is the worst off, servicing the human empire. The natives here, a race called the Bionernites, look just like humans with indigo skin and sea-pale eyes, and they’re practically a slave race. Even here at home, they are kept in poverty-level conditions. No one cares enough to help them, and only a few can afford proper homes, proper beds, proper medicine, or even proper food. Rose, however, refuses to use her race to find something better, so when the governor offers her a room on the Governmental Station, she instantly refuses.

For all their advances in science and technology and philosophy and exploration, it seems that human beings are still the greatest monsters of them all.

With distaste stuck in her throat, Rose stays and works, watching handshakes and rituals and handing out envelopes because, apparently, hard copies are still important. Every night, she goes home to a room with a mattress on the ground and, every once in a while, goes out for drinks and laughs with Rijou. On weekends, which occur every fortnight, the two stay at Rijou’s place and Rose chats with her sister and husband or plays with the children. She is exiled from the kitchen after two separate dinner fiascos, but she’s always welcome to taste the food. Back at work, although she complains about the horrid conditions in this system even to ambassadors, almost losing her job several times, she’s too wary of paradoxes and Reapers and what the Doctor might think to do more than that.

Everything changes when one of the governor’s more damning memos is leaked to the press and circulated around the galaxy, and he only knows of one person who could have been responsible: Rijou, his secretary, an alien. After all, she is a Bionernite, a worker, a lower class citizen and a lower species, and it doesn’t matter that she has worked for him for ten years or that she has two children or that she can make him laugh. He executes her, publicly, and lets it be known that she is a traitor and this is what happens to traitors.

That night, Rose goes to the Resistance and incites an uprising. The day after, she goes into work and can barely hold herself back from killing the governor. She just manages to escape before going underground in what soon becomes an all-out, very public rebellion.

Now, Rose is the alien. For years, this has been the case, but she has never before stayed in one place long enough to feel the throb of total isolation or to see just how much of the hostility she has encountered has all been in response to her race. For the first time in so long, she remembers Mickey and the teacher who tried to fail him because of his skin color, the teacher she almost punched. Then she thinks of the Doctor and wonders whether he ever thought of her like this, as just another alien, and then she stops thinking.

Months go by, and Rose keeps on fighting. Because of her unique ability to cheat death, she is assigned many dangerous missions, most solo, and whispers follow her wherever she goes. She becomes a legend. Soon enough, she also becomes a leader, responsible for strategy and resources and alliances and concealment and so many people’s deaths. Over a year goes by, and some of her fellow faction leaders still treat her with contempt. More than one has questioned the wisdom of fighting with a human, and she finds herself clashing with them over and over again. A few times, she even manages to talk herself out of a struggle. She thinks the Doctor would be proud.

When the end comes, Rose has no new scars and far too much blood on her hands. As she watches Remallo, a one-time enemy and a long-time friend, sign the peace treaty with Emmot Matthews, the president of the Scarlet Juncture, she feels her heart swell with pride. Naturally, she refuses to put down her name, though “Rose Tyler” probably belongs there beside the twelve others, and before she leaves, she gives each of her friends and comrades and warriors a hug or a handshake or a smile, whatever each person wants or needs. She doesn’t feel like an outsider anymore.

On the day she leaves, a memorial service is held, and thinking of Madellipe and Leelan and Serena and Rijou and so many more, she can’t help but tear up. She rarely does that anymore, but at the moment, she doesn’t see the harm in it. She even allows herself to think of the Doctor as they stare off into the red swirling sky and send the black shuttle of ashes into it, a monument meant to float in the heavens for eternity.

Rose thinks how she and the Doctor might still have forever, and how they never ever could.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-Reunion. In an attempt to rediscover herself, Rose decides to leave the Doctor, but like all things, this decision is not without a cost.

Nearly fifteen years have passed since Rose left the Doctor to find herself, and she has stopped crumbling. She can no longer feel the timber of his voice in her ear or picture the shape of his glasses, but she’s almost able to convince herself that this is all right. Then she meets the Face of Boe again and he tells her where she might find Jack; she kisses the glass of his case.

Upon seeing her old friend, Rose doesn’t quite know what to do. They meet at a hotel on the primary continent of Citrafall Nine, and miles below them, beneath the clouds, cars whiz by and people of all shapes and colors and beliefs go on their way to work or lunch or rest or love. She almost feels like one of them and thinks she could be one day. She might even enjoy it. She just doesn’t want to.

“Been expecting you, sweetheart,” he says, grinning at her across the doorway of his room, and then they’re hugging and she’s laughing and clinging to him and he’s swinging her around as the door hisses shut behind them and then they’re kissing and she doesn’t know if she’s ever been this happy. She hasn’t, not for fifteen years.

They sit down in armchairs that change shape and color at the touch of Jack or Rose’s skin, conforming to the sex and species to provide the most comfortable fit. Of course the seat becomes too tall and soft for Rose but she doesn’t care; she’s leaning forward, just watching Jack and noting every little detail again, the way his right hand rests on his knee and he cocks his head to the side and he moves about when he speaks and he smiles so easily. He hasn’t aged and he still wears that old army coat, reminding her of Earth and the girl she’d been then, flirting and dancing on a spaceship in front of Big Ben during the London Blitz. It’s almost enough to convince her that nothing has changed, except, of course, it has. Rose can’t help but feel a little sad.

They talk.

Rose gives him a run-through of some of the adventures she’s had, the supernova she just barely escaped and the archaeological dig she participated in, boiling under an orange alien sun. She even tells him about Crespallion, holding her chin up high against her blush, but he just shakes his head and says, “Thought that human freedom fighter might be you.”

When he talks, she sits there and listens, not as quick to jump in and ask questions as she might once have been. He’s not sure how much she’s heard since their last meeting, he says, since their timelines are like books and Swiss cheese stuck in a blender, so he’ll tell her what he thinks she hasn’t heard. He got married once, a long time ago—him, Jack, settling down. “I know, right?” he says, noticing the surprise on her face. If he notices the jealousy hiding behind the joy, he doesn’t comment, and she’s glad; she doesn’t want him to see the worse part of her.

“She’s dead now,” he says, putting on a nonchalance she knows is forced, “Died three years ago. Life span like ours, lives like ours, we’re not exactly hazard-free.” He can’t quite hide the bitterness in his tone, and something in Rose understands completely.

“I’m sorry,” she says, leaning forward, grasping his hand and squeezing it.

“Yeah, well… it’s how these things go.” He sits back and adopts a lighter tone and Rose can’t help but think of the Doctor, if only for a second. “Bright side: least we never had any kids. Don’t know how they’d handle a daddy who could never die.”

“There are worse dads out there,” she says, still holding his hand.

“Better ones too.”

She doesn’t quite know how to respond to that, not when the topics of fathers and children have always been such sensitive ones for her, so she keeps quiet until Jack does what he does best—he comments on the way her breasts press against the tight fabric of her shirt as she bends over. Rose rolls her eyes, laughs, and straightens up.

“You’re lucky you don’t get a smack offa me for that,” she says.

“Good. I’d hate for that t’happen when I have so much clothes on.”

They move on.

He tells her how he’s settled down twice, once as an agent of the Pyloris System and once as a security guard. The second time was part of a con, though it was for the greater good of some orphans, he assures her. That was how he met his wife, Krista. He tells her of the places he’s visited, how he spotted a younger version of himself once and hid, how he space-jumped between all twenty-six moons of Phoebus and won eight hundred credits. He tells her lots of things, since she doesn’t want to talk so much as listen, but the entire time, there is one unspoken subject practically screaming in Rose’s head.

Jack has almost run out of words when Rose decides to stop being afraid. “The Doctor,” she says, “have you seen him lately?”

Jack sits back in his chair, and already, he seems stiffer, more guarded and formal. “Yeah.”

She sits up too. “And can you… can you get in contact with ‘im?”

After a moment, he nods and points to the earpiece in his right ear. “My very own superphone.” He flashes her the shadow of a grin, and Rose feels a touch of nostalgia. She takes a deep breath, preparing to ask the hard question, but before she can, he continues. “Rose, before you see him, there’s something you should know.”

It only takes a second for the bottom of her stomach to fall away, and then she’s leaning back against the too-soft chair with a hand to her head and everything just feels so surreal. She whispers, “He’s changed.”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“A Dalek.” She almost smiles at the irony. “Just one Dalek left in all of time and space and the Doctor runs into him. What are the chances?”

For the Doctor, Rose thinks, they’re pretty damn good.

Rose doesn’t ask for the exact circumstances and Jack doesn’t tell her. Neither says much after that revelation, and soon, he leaves to go get a drink and pick up some food and maybe even some company—he says this last part with a wink. Rose knows that this is all just a cover for him giving her some time alone with her thoughts, but he won’t listen to her protests about how this is his room, not hers, and how she hates to impose. He’s gone, and she’s left to think.

At first, all Rose can do is sit there and stare off dumbly into space, her eyes roaming carelessly across the swirling texture of the walls and what constitutes as artwork in this galaxy. Then she gets up and paces, wandering through the bedroom and bathroom and image room and living room, just trying to push past the numb despair in her lungs and the haze in her mind.

Her Doctor is gone. Except he isn’t.

She remembers how she jumped right on the regeneration bandwagon the first time around, or at least tried to. She pretended to fully accept this new Doctor until, gradually, she wasn’t pretending anymore. Until he was once again the man she loved. Would it be like that now? Rose knows that she’ll still love him; after all their discussions on the topic of regeneration, after all she’s been through with him, she knows the core of the man doesn’t change. What worries her most, she realizes, isn’t the man her Doctor has become or whether her feelings will change. What worries her most is that, after the way she left him and after all she has done in their time apart, this new Doctor will no longer love her.

When Jack returns, Rose’s mind is still in a flurry of emotions, but she works around that easily enough; she’s learned how to in her time alone. “I want to see him,” she says, and Jack obliges.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-Reunion. In an attempt to rediscover herself, Rose decides to leave the Doctor, but like all things, this decision is not without a cost.

Fourteen years, ten months, and twenty-three days have passed since Rose last spoke to her Doctor, and the whir of the time rotor almost makes her weak at the knees. Time was, she might’ve clung to Jack’s arm for support, but now she clenches her fists and makes herself stand tall and wait as the familiar blue box materializes right in front of her, here, in the living room, surrounded by chairs and tables and crystal decorations. The sight brings tears to her eyes.

Soon, the door opens, and the squeak is so familiar she feels herself transported back, the Doctor there at her shoulder, chattering and pushing open the door so that she could step out, the press of him at her back.

This Doctor is older, she notices, somewhere between her first Doctor and her second Doctor. He still wears a suit, but now it’s lime green and no longer pinstriped (he did used to wear pinstripes, didn’t he?). His shoes are black and he has sunglasses on, and if times had been different, she would have laughed at him for trying to appear suave with a mop of blond hair and an outfit like that. She almost smiles at her first real thought since laying eyes on him: still not ginger.

“Come in, Rose,” he says, giving her a slight smile, and leaves the door open as he disappears back into the TARDIS.

Frozen, she doesn’t move until Jack urges her. “I’ll be right here if you wanna leave.”

“Never,” she replies, and enters what was once home.

Inside, everything is exactly as she remembers. Coral-like supports encircle the room, the console is a conglomeration of pullies and buttons and switches and levers that never quite fit together, and the grating rattles ever so slightly as she moves. The hum of the TARDIS feels like an embrace, and the metallic yet organic smell brings back memories of dashing up the ramp and into the Doctor’s arms or even just watching him bounce around and pretend to work. The memories are so strong that she has to stop and shut her eyes and clench her fists to push them back down. When she recovers, she thinks, _Hello, old girl_ , and she swears the ship’s hum deepens in response. Then she turns her attention to him.

“I’m not the man you were hoping to see, am I, Rose?”

He says this calmly, without a trace of sadness, and she thinks this voice is deeper than the old one though she can’t be sure. The accent makes her remember prominent ears and a leather jacket.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

“’Course it does.” He steps to his left, closer to her, and takes off the glasses. Behind her, the door closes, though whether it’s Jack’s doing or the TARDIS’s, she isn’t sure. Either way, she suddenly feels claustrophobic. But as his brown eyes bore into hers and she recognizes the spark behind them, she feels somewhat comforted, and when he speaks, she almost hears a younger man’s voice. “You were looking for another me.”

He’s across the console from her now, much like he was at their last meeting, but while that wall was built of hostility, this one is made of nothing but uncertainty and fear, maybe all her own. So when he steps forward again, not out of anger but something like sympathy, it is she that recoils, though she hides it well. Why is he even talking to her, she wonders. She wasn’t even there for him when he died, when he changed. How could he possibly forgive her?

“It doesn’t matter,” she repeats, forcing herself to maintain her spot at the end of the entrance ramp, forcing herself to keep meeting those eyes. “You’re still the Doctor, you’re alive, an’ that’s all that matters.”

At the edge of the console closest to her, he stops. He leans back, crossing his arms, and with a somewhat reproachful smile, he says, “That’s not what you said last time.”

“I was an idiot last time.”

“You gave up on me last time.”

“Like I said, idiot.”

“And then you left.”

To this, Rose has no response. She looks down, seeing but not seeing her shoes and the grating and the way the beaten railing stands sergeant along the sides of the entrance ramp. His coat used to hang on that split support to her right, she suddenly remembers, and her clothing too, at times. Sometimes she’d keep entire outfits there, just waiting for him to notice. But now, as she brings her eyes up to examine that spot, she realizes it’s empty, and out of instinct, she looks to her left at the coat rack, expecting to find it in a similar state. Only it’s not, because this new Doctor seems to have kept the trench coat.

Rose’s breath hitches, and she grabs onto the railing. When she looks back at the Doctor, his expression is one of concern or disapproval—she can’t tell which.

A long moment passes between the two of them, the woman whose eyes keep wandering back to that coat and the man who’s so different yet so familiar, underneath that new packaging of his. Rose wonders whether she’ll ever know him well enough to see past that packaging again, and even as the grief claws at her, taunting her with the knowledge that she will never, ever see her Doctor again because he’s dead and gone gone _gone_ , she can’t help but hope that she will.

When the Doctor does speak, it takes Rose a moment to comprehend what he’s saying. “You don’t have to stay, Rose. I’d like for you to, but if this is too much for you, or if you’ve found something or someone better out there, I won’t blame you.”

For a moment, all Rose can do is gape. “You-you _want_ me to stay?”

The Doctor’s face remains nonchalant, and he nods, moving his hands to brace himself against the console. “If you’d like to.”

Rose gapes again. “Are… is this new regeneration of yours completely mad?”

The Doctor raises both eyebrows, and all of a sudden, he looks terribly amused. “Probably not this one. Why?”

“I _left_ you,” she reminds.

“So you did.”

She waits, but nothing more comes. Feeling like a mechanical parrot stuck on repeat, she takes a step closer to him and says, “I left you, alone, to die, an’ now that you’ve changed, on your own, you want me back?”

And although the Doctor does manage to frown, just barely, his amusement only seems to grow. “Well I was under the impression that you left me to go find yourself, but if that’s the real reason, I guess that changes things.”

Rose scowls. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

Before she can continue, the Doctor takes the remaining two steps toward her and puts his hands on her shoulders. At the contact, Rose’s eyes widen before squeezing shut, and she can think of only one thing—for the first time in fifteen years, she’s feeling what it’s like to be touched by the Doctor, _her_ Doctor, again.

“Rose Tyler,” he says in a low voice, and with her eyes closed she can almost imagine the face is different, “I want you to come back to me.” Then the pressure is off her left shoulder and there’s a finger underneath her chin and all of a sudden she’s looking up at him, seeing the reddish stubble along his chin and the concern and sincerity in his eyes. “I understand why you left, Rose, and I don’t want guilt keeping you away.”

Taking a deep breath, Rose just looks at him, really looks at him, not only examining the strange features but searching underneath for the man—the men—she loves. It’s there when he talks, the warmth and the intellect and the pride, all there so plainly that he’s hardly a stranger when her eyes are shut, all there so plainly it hurts. But when her eyes are open, even after all this time among aliens with all sorts of faces, she just can’t bring herself to pretend or accept. She brings up her hand and, holding the fingers inches from his face, softly asks, “Can I?”

He swallows and nods, and Rose is reminded of those moments when her Doctor gazed at her with such trust, those moments when he put his hand to her temple and let her see so much of him, and her throat aches. Her face determined, she reaches out and brushes her fingertips along his skin, tracing the contours of the cheek, the jawbone, the forehead. He doesn’t shave as closely anymore, she notices, and the pads of her fingers tingle. His eyebrows are thinner and his face is narrower. He no longer has sideburns and his nose is slightly more prominent. Even his eyes are a different shape, wider, the lids shut and trembling beneath her touch.

But his lips, she thinks, her fingers just millimeters away, his lips are the same.

Rose draws her hand away and just stares at him, a look of wonder on her face. “Doctor?” she whispers.

He opens his eyes and smiles. “Hello.”

And then she’s pulling him close and they’re hugging and he smells different, his old sweetness replaced by something spicy, but she doesn’t care. Because with her face buried in his shoulder, she can smell that deeper scent, something cold or electric, something Time Lord. It is a scent she has known and loved for nearly three decades, and it is all she needs.

With a sob, Rose pulls him closer, grabbing at the rough jacket, her arms wrapped around his torso and his around hers, his chest pressed to her chest and his legs pressed to her legs. And they’re standing here, together, and Rose is so happy, because this is exactly what she’s been yearning for, this is exactly what she’s missed.

“I wanna come back now, Doctor,” she murmurs, “I’m ready to come back.”

His hold tightens, and she hears him take a deep, shaky breath. “I’d like that,” he whispers.

And for the first time in so very long, Rose Tyler feels like she’s come home.


End file.
